Kerschbaum argues that discourse extends beyond spoken or written language to encompass material objects, body language, and physical environments. By integrating perspectives from materialist disability studies and critical phenomenology, the author offers a theoretical counterbalance to purely social constructionist models, arguing that the material world serves as an "active co-participant" in the construction of disability. This approach insists on recognizing the "shared world-making" that occurs between material realities and social constructions.

State University of New York at Binghamton

- The Material Surround
- Evidence from Reviewed Chapters
- Research Implications

Materiality and Discourse

The theory that what we consider “reality” is a collection of collaboratively constructed views of the world created through social interactions that then become the basis for shared assumptions, meanings, and ascribed values within a society.

Social Constructionism

Material/materiality refers to how we exist in the world and our embodied realities, notably material/materiality is not meant to mention labels put on our experience or how we sort our selves into groups.

Material

Lester, J. N. (Ed.). (2021). Discursive Psychology and Disability. Palgrave Studies in Discursive Psychology. Springer Nature Switzerland AG.

Reference For: Discursive Psychology and Disability

The Material Surround

Kerschbaum uses these studies to illustrate how the material world actively participates in constructing disability. She highlights Wan’s analysis in chapter 7, where hearing assistive devices and cochlear implants fundamentally shape the nature of social interactions, while noting that Gabriel and Kelley demonstrate in chapter 6 how "invisible" disabilities like dyslexia become visible through material factors such as classroom behaviors, time constraints, and affective responses like frustration. Furthermore, she points to Stinesen et al.’s findings in chapter 4, observing that patients distinguish between a "willing mind" and a "disabled body," a separation enforced by the embodied experience of pain preventing physical action.

Evidence from Reviewed Chapters

Kerschbaum suggestions that bringing materialist disability studies together with discursive psychology invites new questions regarding how "material artifacts comprise the analytic scene" and participate in discursive constructions. Consequently, she suggests that researchers must expand their analytic attention to include elements such as "eye contact and gaze, bodily orientations," and "recording technologies" to fully understand how disability is negotiated.

Research Implications

-  representations (e.g. ideas, theories, taxonomies)
- general non-representational facts 
- non-representational facts about human traits.


Types of Social Constructs

The social construction of race refers to how the concept and categories of race, as well as the meanings given to them, are not innate, but instead formed by society. While there are real physical traits that humans have, such as skin color, these traits do not exist in the format of clearly defined boxes that the concept “race” is structured as, nor do they correspond to any personal traits or values, a false belief that racism is built upon.

The Social Construction of Race

Becoming can be originally attributed to theorists Gilles Deleuze and Feliz Guattari but Price is choosing to use the definition offered by Nirmala Erevelles that draws on feminist-of-color and crip-of-color works. Erevelles described becoming by saying that we can understand race and disability as entangled because in the American context the racialized violence and the materiality of that violence that occurred during the Middle Passage, used to describe the forced trafficking of enslaved people from Africa, is seen as the original space of difference, so disability as a construct should be understood as not coming after or as a consequence of Middle Passage but through Middle Passage. Erevelles' theory foregrounds the importance of recognizing specific political, historical, and material contexts. 

Theory of Becoming

Price points out that, in understanding space as political-relational, space is inseparable from time and relations. Price also notes that this inseparability relates to materialist rhetorics and the idea that space is relational if we are not centering humans or animals as the only beings with animacy and agency.

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